References 93 VI 1 Introduction Unemployment is still a central problem in European economies and an abiding theme in labour market policy. In the 1990s, in the European Union, rising unemployment led to an European employment policy and a new section on employment was introduced into the Amsterdam Treaty signed in October 1997. In the same year, the European Employment Strategy (EES) was initi...

We study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an environment with moral hazard and cyclical fluctuations. The optimal unemployment insurance contract balances the insurance motive to provide consumption for the unemployed with the provision of incentives to search for a job. This balance is affected by aggregate conditions, as recessions are characterized by reductions in job finding...

a r t i c l e i n f o In January 2003, the unemployment benefits in Finland were increased for workers with long employment histories. The average benefit increase was 15% for the first 150 days of the unemployment spell. At the same time severance pay system was abolished. In this paper we evaluate the effect of the change in the benefit structure on the duration of unemployment by comparing t...

This paper shows that state control of some industries may have contributed to the increase in European unemployment from the 1970s to the early 1990s. We develop a simple model with both publicly-run and privately-run enterprises and show that when economic turbulence increases, higher unemployment rates may result in economies that have a larger public sector. JEL Classification: E240, J450, ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Studies have shown that living in more deprived neighbourhoods is related to higher mortality rates, independent of individual socioeconomic characteristics. One approach that contributes to understanding the processes underlying this association is to examine whether the relation is modified by the country context. In this study, the size of the association between neighbourhoo...

D I S C U S S I O N of the economic situation of Northern Ireland has been dominated by persistently high rates of unemployment. Since 1936 these rates have been higher than in any other region o f the United Kingdom. Since the war unemployment rates have not fallen below 5 per cent, local area rates have been as high as 20 per cent and long-term unemployment has accounted for over 50 per cent ...

We examine the effect of a federally-funded local infrastructure spending program on local unemployment rates. To address the likely funding endogeneity problem,we exploit variation in spending due to pork-barreling, and find that higher government expenditure on roads substantially reduces local unemployment. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

After several decades of decline, U.S. suicide rates have risen since 2005, a trend driven largely by increases among those aged 45-64 that began in 1999. A prominent explanation for this pattern relates to deteriorating economic conditions, especially the sharp rise in unemployment associated with the Great Recession of 2007-2009. We pool data from 1997 to 2010 on the 50 U.S. states to examine...

It has been claimed that unemployment affects the health and thus the mortality of the unemployed, their families, and other members of their communities. This paper examines the relation between mortality and the unemployment experiences of small areas which vary in the extent to which their unemployment levels have changed in recent years. Quarterly numbers of unemployed, classified by age, s...